Eric Lee

Several years ago, shortly after it was launched I looked into Google's keyword-based online advertising as a tool for trade union campaigns. I thought it seemed a really good idea, tested it, and promoted its use to unions.

Today, I think that more and more unions and campaigning organizations recognize that by using Google ads, we can send out a subversive message about corporations at a very low price to a very large audience.

But if we think of Google ads as the final word in using the net to promote our campaigns, we are kidding ourselves. Using our imaginations, we can find many more ways, often free of charge, to counter the dominant pro-corporate message and to tell the workers' side of any story.

Yesterday I was demonstrating the use of Google ads to a union which needed to focus attention of a giant transnational corporation which is attempting to smash a local union in south-west Asia. (I won't give any details here for reasons why may become readily apparent in a moment.)

We went to Google, placed our ad, and were delighted to see within minutes that anyone searching for that company, or its flagship product, or even the name of the country where they were attempting to smash a union, would see our ad appearing on top of the Google search results.

But we noticed one other thing too. The first three search results reported by Google were official, company-owned websites. But the fourth was the listing for this company on the Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.

In other words, anyone looking for information on this company or its well-known products would likely visit the page on the Wikipedia. If only there were a way we could put our own message there ...

I smile as I type this. Anyone who knows anything about the Wikipedia knows that unlike more traditional encyclopedias, this one is based on the technology of Wikis – meaning that anyone who can read a page can write to it. It's entirely user-controlled.

So while demonstrating the use of Google ads to my colleague yesterday, I suggested that we click on the link to the page about this company on the Wikipedia – and that we include our own subversive message there.

You don't need an account on the Wikipedia to do anything – you can make changes anonymously – but it helps and adds some credibility if you do sign up and, in essence, sign what you do. So I signed in, having earlier set up an account there.

We went into a section of the page about this company, and entered a single paragraph, filled with links to the union website, pointing out that this company has been engaged in union-busting in this country in 2007.

A second or two later, our account of what had happened was live on the Wikipedia. If you were looking up this company or its most famous product on Google, this is the first page you'd find in its listings after the official company pages.

The story doesn't end there, however. As this is a very well-known company, the pages on the Wikipedia are constantly being edited and reviewed by volunteers. Within 24 hours, our change had disappeared – not because the company censored it, but because we'd put it on the page devoted to criticizing the company's product, not the company itself. That, it turns out, is another page entirely – now updated with the original text we used.

I learned a few things from this experience.

First, we should always incorporate the Wikipedia into any online campaigns we wage – and even into organizing campaigns that are waged offline. People checking out Starbucks on the Wikipedia, to choose an example relevant to this union, will find exactly the kind of effort we are looking for. The sub-section of Wikipedia's Starbucks page entitled “Labor disputes” includes a paragraph which begins, “Since 2004, Starbucks employees at several locations in New York City and Chicago have joined the Industrial Workers of the World labor union, calling themselves the IWW Starbucks Workers Union.” And the Starbucks Workers Union is, in turn, a separate page on the Wikipedia. All unions and campaigning organizations should follow this model.

Second, we should be aware of, and sensitive to, how a free, open-source, volunteer-based project like the Wikipedia works. We should create accounts and make our changes under our own names, not anonymously. We should pay attention to Wikipedia's unique syntax, making sure that our changes and additions to pages are written as they should be, with proper links. No other volunteer should have to come in an clean up our mess.

Third, we cannot simply post and forget, as the first example I gave showed. Either because we've made a mistake (for example, posting to the wrong page) or because someone is trying to censor us, we have to monitor regularly whether the change we made is still there.

Fourth, we need to keep any entries we've made up to date. If we've reported on union-busting, on a worker being sacked, or on a strike, we should from time to time make sure the text we added is updated.

Fifth, if someone in the Wikipedia community challenges us using the online discussion built into every Wikipedia page, we should engage that person in discussion. Others will read this, and potentially a huge audience can read a discussion that can go far beyond what we might put on the actual page.

And finally, if you think the Wikipedia is a fantastic resource and you're thrilled by the fact that it's free and independent, with no advertising, you have a moral responsibility to help keep it that way. Please join me in becoming a regular financial contributor, giving whatever you can afford.

Make no mistake about this: the Wikipedia is becoming a massively important resource for millions of people. It is now generating approximately 30,000 requests per second (about 2.5 billion requests per day). And the growth in use, as well as content, has been exponential over several years.

While it remains important to get our message out to conventional media through press releases and so on, it may be even more important to make sure that our side of every story – the workers' side – is featured in the Wikipedia.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Often when left-wing people talk about the Internet, the subject of a “digital divide” comes up. According to the common wisdom, the Internet is all well and good when we're talking about well-paid, educated people living in rich countries, but it's useless as a way of communicating with the poor – and not only overseas. Even in places like Britain, it remains true that the more money you have, the more likely you are to be online.

And yet there are increasingly examples of audacious attempts to break through the digital divide and one of the most extraordinary is a project in Canada called “Homeless Nation”. The website – at http://www.homelessnation.org – is a place where currently homeless people, as well as those who were recently homeless, can use the net to communicate with one another and the world.

The founders of the site say “The Homeless Nation website has been created to reverse stereotyping, to empower the street community to undertake their own representation, and to foster a national dialogue around the most serious social problem facing us today: homelessness.”

At the present time, the site has over 1,500 registered users. Hundreds of homeless people use it to collect their email, to post photographs and videos, and even to maintain their own blogs (including videoblogs). There is a French version in addition to the English one.

The site's users share experiences and knowledge, discussing things like how to cash a cheque when you don't have identification or a fixed address. They invite each other to attend rallies, to get involved in fighting for their rights.

Even before the Homeless Nation website existed, many homeless people were using the Internet – often through public libraries.

Homeless Nation is an extraordinary project, and one should keep it in mind the next time someone denies that the Internet is a useful tool for reaching out to working class or poor people. If hundreds of homeless people are making video broadcasts and blogging online, trade unions should also be maximizing their use of the new technology – and involving their members.

Posted by Eric Lee at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)